B2B Voice of Customer Discovery Interviews

New Product Blueprinting builds on earlier methodologies, such as traditional Voice of the
Customer (VOC), QFD and DFSS.1
However, the Blueprinting process and training was designed just for B2B suppliers. Your B2B customers are more insightful, more rational, more interested and fewer in number than end-consumers.

If you use hand-me-down consumer-goods VOC methods, you’ll forego these advantages… and learn far less than you could about market needs.

1. Digital Projection

Whenever possible, you’ll use a
digital projector to capture customers’ ideas. This completely
changes the interview dynamics, since customers don’t have
to guess what you’re scribbling or typing. AIM's Blueprinter®
software lets you record and sort their comments on digital
“sticky notes”… creating a shared “idea-generation”
atmosphere. This also allows for real-time corrections and
greatly impresses customers. These Discovery Interviews
can boost customers’ view of you long before your new
product arrives.

2. No Questionnaires

Most VOC training encourages
you to develop brilliant questions in an interview script. We
teach you how to brilliantly probe customer responses. You
ask a few simple questions and then follow their lead… as
they direct you to the areas they are most concerned with
(all within your project scope, of course). Customers feel like
you are really listening to them… not just filling in your
questionnaire. Customers say they find this “refreshing.”

3. No Selling, No Solving

Your commercial people have been trained to sell and your technical
people to solve. But in Blueprinting interviews, they just search. They use highly-refined probing
techniques to uncover market needs your competitors completely miss. Blueprinting is very
intentional about staying clear of solving (which wastes time and jeopardizes your intellectual
property) and selling (which wastes time and makes you appear self-serving).

4. Customer Needs before Supplier Solutions

Many companies say they want to understand market
needs… when they really just want to validate solutions
developed in their labs and conference rooms. If your
NPD process begins with an “idea light-bulb,” it’s usually
your idea, not your customers’, right? No wonder most
new products fail! Blueprinting inverts this process, so
you start with market needs and then look inside and
outside your company for the best solution.

5. Time-Efficient

Traditional VOC interviews that call for tape-recording require hours of
transcribing and interpretation. Your B2B customers are capable—and usually eager—to help you
understand and prioritize their needs while still in the room with you. (And B2C techniques such as
tape-recording or one-way mirrors can make them feel more like Jane Goodall’s chimps than
professional peers.) Your interview team has a short post-interview debriefing… and they’re done.

6. Market-Driven Data

When you conduct
Preference Interviews in a second round of
customer visits, Blueprinter® software generates
Market Satisfaction Gaps (MSG). Customer
outcomes with MSG > 30% indicate the customer
is eager for change. In some cases, you’ll learn
customers are already satisfied: Instead of
developing a product for this market, drop the
project and move on to something customers care
about. And celebrate! This is how companies stop
squandering scarce R&D and marketing resources.

7. Search Your Value Chain

Unlike B2C producers, your product might be part of your
customer’s customer’s product, their customer’s product and so on. We teach advanced techniques
to help you go down this value chain to understand needs. Also, B2C producers assign “one vote”
per consumer… while you need to weight the buying power and value chain position of downstream
customers. Blueprinting lets you do this with simple but powerful quantitative tools.

8. Superior Value Propositions

Blueprinter software helps you set product
objectives based on data from interviews
and competitive testing. Visual tools let you
view “what-if” product designs, predict
market reaction to each, and select the
best. Resulting value propositions—void of
wishful thinking and internal bias—are
captured in a 12-point VC-quality Business
Case. You can use this as a stand-alone
justification or as a supplement to your
existing stage-and-gate process.

9. Building Corporate Memory

Instead of using many unconnected
tools, we capture the entire front-end of product development in a single
Microsoft Excel®-based Blueprinter document (Blueprinter 5.0 now let’s your teams collaborate using the cloud.) This gives teams an easy-to-follow
roadmap and builds corporate memory by allowing easy data
retrieval later. Clients have called Blueprinter “the lab notebook for
marketing professionals.”

Microsoft Excel® is a registered trademark of The Microsoft Corporation

10. Designed for the Masses

You don’t want just a handful of internal experts hearing your
customers’ “voice.” With our workshops, coaching and follow-up, a critical mass of your
organization will continually uncover customer needs and become less internally-focused. Don’t
outsource this work to VOC consultants: It’s a strong competitive advantage you should own.

Get Voice of Customer Training

We know it can be difficult to grasp how to use Blueprinting, which is why we offer voice of customer training for your team. We’d be happy to spend time with you in a private web conference learning about your specific situation and going over the voice of customer training options. Contact us with any questions about Blueprinting.